June 5 -- Feast of Saint Boniface

I'm not usually a fan of iconoclasm, but in this instance I will make an indefensible suggestion.

Boniface was an Englishman, author of the first Latin grammar in English, and a scholar of the first order. There were efforts to keep him in England by electing him to Church offices, but he had a calling to convert the Germans. He followed Willibrord and Winfrid to Frisia, but King Radbod chased them back to England, saying that he had no desire to "go to heaven with a handful of beggars." Willibrord went north to Utrecht, and Boniface followed after Radbod's death was announced.

Boniface split his time between big organizational work for the Church and evangelizing the people of Germany. He took time out to got to Rome and officially get his pallium, to crown Pepin king of the Franks, to reorganize the Frankish Church, which had become lax and ignorant, and to return to Rome to become a papal legate. Eventually, at 79 or 80 years old, some bandits overran his Church. He ordered everyone not to fight back, so there was of course a massacre. There were, however, survivors who described the bandits' disappointment when they discovered that the many chests that Boniface treasured did not contain gold and silver, but rather holy scriptures. They vented the anger, but some books survived too, including the Ragyndrudis Codex, shown in the photo. They say this was the book that Boniface was reading when the attack came - the bloodstains and sword cuts are still visible on it. It is kept in Fulda, along with Boniface's relics.

But about the legendary iconoclasm. When Boniface was working the crowd in Fritzlar, in the Hesse region of Germany, he found them very reluctant to give up veneration of the old Norse gods. He walked over to the Donar Oak (incorrectly named Jupiter's Oak in Willibald's account) and grabbed an axe. The assembled crowd waited for Thor to defend the sacred tree. Boniface said a prayer and started chopping. The tree fell over and the crowd was still waiting. After a few minutes, everyone could see which way the wind was blowing, even though it wasn't blowing through those branches anymore. They accepted baptism; Boniface had the tree split up and the lumber used in the construction of a chapel on the very spot the tree had grown.